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Billionaires Anoint Biogeeks

Hey Nobel Prize in Medicine! You’ve got competition. This morning, a bevy of techoscenti billionaires including Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin announced the first recipients of their Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, a $3 million award ”recognizing excellence in research aimed at curing intractable diseases and extending human life.” This year, there are 11 recipients, meaning a total $33 million payout, but in the future five annual awards will be planned, totalling $15 million.

The award is the brainchild of billionaire Yuri Milner, an early Facebook investor, who gives a similar prize in physics. Aside from Brin and Zuckerberg, he is joined by: Anne Wojcicki, Brin’s wife and the chief executive of 23andMe, the consumer genetics startup; Priscilla Chan, Zuckerberg’s wife and a physician who is in residency; and Art Levinson, the chairman of the board at Apple who previously, as chief executive of Genentech, was the most respected leader in the pharmaceutical industry. The awards are being announced formally later today at conference led by Susan Desmond-Hellmann, once Levinson’s right-hand woman and now chancellor of UCSF.

“I believe this new prize will shine a light on the extraordinary achievements of the outstanding minds in the field of life sciences, enhance medical innovation, and ultimately become a platform for recognizing future discoveries,” Levinson said in a prepared statement. Added Brin: “Curing a disease should be worth more than a touchdown.”

So what brain trust did this brain trust decide to present checks to? Interestingly, though not surprisingly, it’s a list that focuses on those who have actually changed medicine and biotechnology, even inventing new drugs. One is even one of Levinson’s old employees. The winners:

Cornelia I. Bargmann of Rockefeller University studies a primitive worm, C. elegans, which has only 302 neurons in its brain. The idea is that by studying this tiny brain, we can learn how brains work, and Bargmann’s opinions are sought out by neuroscientists and psychiatrists.

David Botstein of Princeton University developed, in 1980, a method for discovering disease genes that was used to find the BRCA breast cancer gene, a test for which is the main product of Myriad Genetics, and the genetic mutation that causes Huntington’s. Eighteen years later he led a team that figured out new ways to analyze data from the tiny “DNA chips” that were revolutionizing genetics. He’s now studying how yeast consume food and create energy, an effort that could lead to a new understanding of lots of biological problems, including how cancer cells eat.

Lewis C. Cantley of Weill Cornell Medical College, who discovered an enzyme called PI3 kinase that is a key drug target for new medicines against cancer. He is a co-founder of Agios Pharmaceuticals and a pioneer in the field of Systems Biology, which tries to put the pieces looked at by geneticists and molecular biologists into a more coherent whole.

Dr. Hans Clevers, director of the Hubrecht Institute for Developmental Biology and Stem Cell Research in the Netherlands, who has been one of the leading figures in the discovery that stem cells play a role in the development of cancer.

Dr. Napoleone Ferrara of the University of California, San Diego, at Genentech did work that led the creation of Avastin, for colon and other cancers, and Lucentis, for age-related macular degeneration. Both drugs work by stopping a process called angiogenesis, which in feeds tumors and, in eye disease, results in too much blood entering the eye and causing damage.

Titia de Lange of Rockefeller University studies telomeres, the protective ends of the chromosomes that contain human DNA. When these degrade, they can lead to some types of cancer.

Eric S. Lander of the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lander is most famous for his leadership role in the Human Genome Project and for his work running the Broad Institute, which has become one of the hot spots for genetic research. But he’s also responsible for helping to develop a molecular taxonomy of cancer and for mentoring many of the top researchers in the field.

Dr. Charles L. Sawyers It’s not just that Sawyers, of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, looks into the molecular signals that drive a cell to cancer, it’s that he’s twice played a key role in getting drugs that affect those signals to patients. The first time was with Gleevec, from Novartis, which started off the race for DNA-targeted cancer drugs. The second, more recently, was Medivation’s Xtandi, for prostate cancer patients, which was recently approved.

Dr. Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins University, devised a model for the progression of colon cancer that is widely used in colonoscopy. More recently he is one of the very top minds looking at how genetic alterations lead to cancer.

Robert A. Weinberg of M.I.T., discovered the first human gene that, when mutated, causes cancer, setting up science to understand cancer as a series of genetic mutations.

Dr. Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University and the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, figured out how to make what are known as induced pluripotent stem cells. These resemble embryonic stem cells, which can in theory turn into any part of the body, but they are far more useful for studying what goes wrong to make disease happen. In a few years they have already revolutionized biology.

Next year, this year’s winners will help pick the next batch of luminaries.

Is this a good way for Zuckerberg et. al to spend their cash? There’s no way to argue with that list: those are great people to be giving an award and they all deserve it. I’m mostly thrilled at the idea that Vogelstein and Bargmann and Yamanaka are all going to be flush.

But I have trouble believing that this award is going to make any of them much more famous. Most people reading this will probably remember Milner and Brin more than Sawyers and Napo Ferrera. And, as Forbes contributor David Shaywitz noted on Twitter, among biologists these folks are already idolized. What they all need are funds to keep them in the field, not new people to look up to. Brin is speaking my language when he says that curing disease should be worth more than a touchdown. Even with prizes that big, I’m not sure it is.

Still, the awards are a good step. Let’s hope that as years pass, they draw more and more attention to the amazing things happening in science and medicine.

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I suppose the awards will make these folks richer, but Vogelstein et al have already been very successful financially. I agree that these awards aren’t likely to increase their “star power” – if you’re going to consider them a celebrity, you’ve already heard of them. Craig Venter must be taking a long lonely yacht cruise tonight.

The first group was selected and will be the committee that searches for the next group of recipients. My feeling is that they chose the people they did because they are well respected for long-term mentoring and committee skills, as well as their scientific research. This makes them great for forming a long-term foundation dedicated to selecting award recipients.

Because, if it’s not obvious, that’s what Milner et al are doing here: creating a sped-up, more-flexible mechanism for awarding innovative research (compared to Nobel), and I assume they expect it to last a long time. The actual size of the principal backing the awards presumably is large enough to sustain a few years, but it’s also possible it’s large enough they can give this level of awards indefinitely.

The website is up, and it includes an outline of the award plans. There are a number of superficial points about how it’s structured, and what it will do in the future (but all too many “please check back later” as well). Note that anybody can nominate a potential recipient (hate to be the person handling *that* email address).

This is truly a Wonderful thing being done by these Cyber-geek Billionaires. Ive noticed that these types of billionaires are not usually motivated by money and the disease of “more money”. It gives me great hope that these Tech-Giants care about what matters more in life than the trivial and material. And recognize Scientists as more valuable to society than Tom Brady. Hope to see more of it.

I question the scale of the awards. I think it shows the level of disconnect between Silicon Valley and biology researchers: To the foundation, 3 million dollars per person appears to be a normal award amount, but I bet all eleven winners would have been just as happy, and far less shocked and confused, with even 10% of the money. Breakthrough scientific research doesn’t come from just a handful of scientists who have already made a name for themselves, but from collaborations between many researchers. While I’m thrilled that the tech community has shown a real interest in the life sciences, I would have liked to see slightly smaller individual prizes, and maybe some money made available by the standard process of application and review to emerging labs, researchers, and initiatives. Preserving a broad network of researchers may in the long run be more rewarding than only awarding the top talent.

And when it comes to angiogenesis – two important facts: 1. Judah Folkman first published his concept of tumor angiogenesis in 19718. He postutaled that the recruitment of dedicated blood vessels is essential to tumor growth but he never got a Nobel prize while he was alive.

2. It ia also well known that angiogenesis is a vital function for healthy tissues too, so messing with it causes side effects (Avastin) and in any case just slows down things until cancer cells find a way to dodge the drug (see also HIV drug-resistance evolution; rings a bell?).

Totally correct, Matt – “drug that made Folkman’s vision a reality”! But that discovery was already properly rewarded. I think, it would have been better if those 3 million dollars were given to someone who would possibly “refine” the drug – i.e. make it attack specifically the tumor cells (and as far as I know there are scientist which do work on similar issues). Well, hopefully this will happen one day.

This reminds me of a debate that one big foundation board had a while back about whether to build a new art museum or a world-class arts village for nourishing new artists. In the end, unfortunately, they spent hundreds of millions on a shiny hilltop museum to collect and display great art made in the past, rather than fund a bold effort to *make* great art.

It is commendable to reward scientists who have made this level of accomplishment. Do you know their individual histories enough to know whether their breakthroughs had already made them “flush”? If not, all the better as far as these rewards go.

That said, I’d rather see the $3M go to big bets on the best and brightest young biogeeks—in order to prompt make new breakthroughs!

Of course, they’re perfectly able to do both. Maybe that will come in version 3.0.

I nominate Prof. Woodrow C. Monte, 68, Food Science and Nutrition, Arizona State University, retired 2004, the world expert on aspartame (methanol, formaldehyde) toxicity since 1984, who since fall 2006 has been giving a breakthrough paradigm that in humans only, methanol reaches all parts of the body and fetus via the blood every minute with a half-life of 3 hours, and is made into free floating formaldehyde right inside the cells of 19 tissues that have high levels of ADH1 enzyme, causing many modern chronic novel “diseases of civilization”. Smoke from a pack of cigarettes gives 60 mg methanol, same as from a quart aspartame diet drink. His work is backed by 745 free full text medical research references at WhileScienceSleeps.com …